Helicopter

The small passage was in the upper area of a room wall. The room beyond was bathed in dim light generated by control lights and computer screens. Small machines rotated, robotic arms moved as they worked. On the opposite side was a large plexiglass pane through which spectators could watch what was happening in the laboratory. Sideways, Aurelia saw what they had come for.

A glass case housed six pea-sized stones, which were anchored in a socket in a chemical bath. The box was swung back and forth by a machine so that the liquid sloshed around the stones in motion. A faint green light made the stuff slightly fluorescent.

After a short concentration, she gave Row a curt wave to understand that it could start. This pushed up next to her and briefly closed her green eyes to collect herself. She folded her hands and jerked them open facing the grille. The silent pressure wave blew the square cover into the laboratory, first with a metallic tear, then accompanied by a rattle.

The noises betrayed their intrusion, but they had expected that. Aiden's stun grenade sailed past Aurelia in a flash and everyone put on their breathing masks. The explosion and the biting veil of noise gave them cover for the time being when they stormed the room. Aurelia drew her gun, her fingers closed around the grip and trigger with a comfortably familiar feeling, and she jumped down with one leap. The other four followed without hesitation.

At the same moment the front door flew off its hinges and armed guards broke into the laboratory. Aurelia herself watched the spectacle to the accompaniment of the music, which made the whole thing seem unreal, almost like training. She gestured at Viktor and instructed him to cover her left flank, meanwhile she cited Pareios to the right.

Aurelia ran towards the guard who was closest to her. She could only vaguely see it in the smoke, which was her great advantage. She didn't need to see or hear, intuition guided her steps.

Bullet!

A feeling made her dodge a volley from her opponent's machine gun. Skillfully she turned through the hail without being hit even once, then she knocked the rifle out of the man's hand with a flat blow. She guessed his movements, the punch combination he was about to use. Right, left, left, right. Aurelia ducked quickly left, right, right, left and ducked under his fists. The fast bass in her ears set the right step rhythm until she stood between the attacker's outstretched arms. Surprise gripped his features the moment he died when Aurelia shot him in the head.

As he slumped, her gift sensed a good opportunity. She took two steps back, avoiding a shot, dropped onto her back, and rolled to one side. She came behind Pareios, whose opponent knocked her down past her teammate's head with an aimed shot. Almost simultaneously, intuition led her hand to the boot and made her pull a knife, which she pulled through the Achilles tendons of two other men without thinking.

Meanwhile Pareios and Viktor drove back the right and left wings of the attacking pack. Viktor's speed was unmatched. With this gift, he beat every shot, while his opponents could barely perceive it. Even Aurelia saw only the capers of smoke that caused his movements, but not himself.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw how Row removed the lid of the glass case with another shock wave and Aiden dipped his hands into the billowing liquid.

Aurelia was relieved to initiate the retreat when she was hit by a paralyzing lightning bolt. All of her attention was immediately drawn to something else.

She fixed a young man who was standing behind the pack of security guards without a weapon and completely calm, while Aurelia rendered two guys harmless and rammed the knife into the throat of a third.

She felt it, the motionless one was one of them.

As if by themselves they carried their feet towards him. She routinely pulled the machine gun from her back and pulled the trigger. The bullets whizzed through the smoke and smashed through the panes of glass at the other end of the room. These shattered and filled the air with a rain of glass dust.

The guy, on the other hand, suddenly disappeared and Aurelia's gift shot her a single warning thought: a teleporter!

When he reappeared from behind her position, she had already turned around after playing through several scenarios in her head. Even through the smoke, she noticed how his face twisted when he realized that his plan wasn't going to work.

Aurelia immediately pulled the trigger again. As expected, the enemy escaped the bullets by disappearing again with a condescending expression on his face. But Aurelia immediately threw her knife to the left and it didn't miss him. It pierced the enemy's ribs and penetrated his heart as he teleported directly into their trajectory. The man with the fair hair opened his eyes in shock and looked down at himself before exhaling with a sigh.

No, Aurelia never missed her target.

Viktor's speed had almost completely eliminated the guard on their left and Pareios broke the arm of an attacker with a lever in order to grill a second and last enemy with one of his fireballs at the same time. Then he turned lightly and with anatomical precision tore up the femoral artery of the first, from which the man would bleed to death in less than a minute. Pareios' victim knelt, the red, viscous liquid gushing out of the gaping wound on the inside of the thigh. The color drained from him with every drop. A head shot ended his suffering. 

Aurelia helped Viktor eliminate the remaining men in a matter of seconds. In her back, Row and Aiden had loosened the stones from their anchors and packed them in a gray metal box with pre-made holes. Aiden quickly scooped some of the chemical liquid with his hand, snapped the lid shut with a bang, and stowed the package safely in the breast pocket of his jacket.

Another minute, Viktor signaled to the group and they ran back to the ventilation shaft.

Just as Aurelia was pushing her way through the small opening as the penultimate, her intuition sent another vision of several possible futures. She motioned to Row. She understood, stretched out her left arm and sent out a pressure wave from the palm of her hand, which threw back the second onslaught of attackers that penetrated through the door. That should give the team the decisive edge. Aurelia grabbed her colleague's arm and pulled her through the small square into the shaft.

Without looking back, they sprinted after the others. Aurelia's strong muscles cheered while she added another tooth. The troop climbed the rope that was left behind. As soon as they climbed into the last horizontal part of the pipe, the flickering sound of the rotor blades of a helicopter could be heard.

The gusts he caused pulled strands of ebony brown hair out from under Aurelia's balaclava. As the team ran towards the opening, Aiden pulled a small green light from his pocket and flashed it three times. The sign for their pick-up team that they had no pursuers yet.

The helicopter turned right in front of the hole and the door was thrown open. They jumped off the edge of the shaft, flew a few meters through the pounding rain and finally slid to land inside the helicopter.

The flight attendant pulled the sliding door shut and the pilot pulled the machine straight up into the black night sky.